Quote of the Day - Socialism and Communism

The difference between socialism and communism is that socialists will take your money and give you nothing, while communists will take your money and shoot you. – Winston Churchill.

It is true. We have seen how socialist utopia after socialist utopia gets into power promising the moon before delivering nothing while taxing the proles for the utopian benefits the socialists never quite get around to delivering. We are watching that happen in New York City and Seattle right now.

Eventually, unchecked socialism slides into full-fledged communism, as it did in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. We know those countries arrived at communism when their governments began shooting those who objected to getting nothing. Sometimes it happened in job lots. This is why, as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit observed, you can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out of it. (Fortunately, the US has a lot of guns. If communism ever takes hold here, we can shoot our way out of it if need be.)

Socialism has become popular again among this country's youth. I place a large part of the blame for that on institutional capture of the American education system by Marxists. Today's students at every level are taught that socialism is benign, capitalism is oppressive, Christianity is backwards and Islam is as peaceful as religions come. Worse, the exceptional nature of the United States's governing system is neglected, belittled, and ignored.

Fifty years ago we celebrated this country's bicentennial. The picture below is a class photo from Ross Elementary School in League City, TX. It has a patriotic theme, and students were encouraged to come dressed in colonial costumes. Many did. Every grade has a similar class photo with students and teachers in Colonial dress.

(Courtesy Helen Hall Library Local History Collection, League City, TX)

We had the 250th anniversary of the United States this year: How many public schools in the United States organized similar displays? How many ignored the Semiquincentennial? How many treated it as an object of mourning, or as objectionable? I would bet there were a lot more of the latter than the former.

For all the trendiness of the DSA and socialism, the ideology collides hard with reality. It devolves into misery quickly. Cuba and Venezuela were once rich countries. Due to their communist leaders, they are now poor, despite the material riches within those countries. Similarly, the socialist experiments in Seattle and New York City are dissolving into anarchy and chaos. They are unsustainable.

Will this change young people's views about socialism? Doubtful as long as our schools remain under the control of Marxists. If we do not fix our education system, this country cannot long endure. Rome offers a historical example in its Crisis of the Third Century. The Roman education system collapsed before the onset, operating for the sake of the pedagogues rather than the students. (Sound familiar?) It turned out a generation of Roman leaders ignorant of their country's laws, traditions, and heritage, and often hardly literate. (Again, does that sound familiar?)

We must again educate our youth about our great republic and its foundations in individual liberty and limited government. They must be taught the truth about both capitalism and socialism. Beyond that, we must encourage agency and entrepreneurialism. They must be reminded that the age of innovation abides today. It is not buried in a nineteenth- or twentieth-century past. Today's United States is still a place where a child born in Africa can move, start with almost nothing, and rise through good ideas and hard work to become not just the world's richest man but the inventor of products that are changing the world for the better.